danz radikle reviewz

hundreds of classics rotting away in the vaults but here’s what’s been digitally mastered for our enjoyment.

• - somehow i’ve never seen this
• - more sonny chiba. whitney’s looked better
• - arch hall jr!
• - an incredibly mcclure-esque title.
• - it’s odd how many films there are about fixing point shaving
• - what can you say.

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another catchup post - i think i saw this a month ago. like everyone else i really disliked how fake the seekers looked. and i really stopped paying attention once plot kicked in. that whole butterfly thing completely missed me and i was just waiting for it to be over.

i like the idea of the beginning a lot - alone in the city with little dialogue or anything, just doing shit - but they were so broad about things i thought they missed a lot of opportunities. the best example of this is when he’s going through the apartment and finds the baby room. you’ve got endless opportunity for some great bittersweetness but instead they go full throttle with the most obvious tragedy possible. and will smith too - he did a good job for sure but there’s just something too corny about him for me to buy into any deep notions. i was also annoyed by the broadness of the bob marley songs. the ironic ‘don’t worry about a thing’ and calling a compilation the best album ever recorded. i do think the video store scenes were incredible. especially the ’say hello to me’ bit as some sort of ‘alone in a sea of people’ metaphor.

the final two things that annoyed me - his dog in the front seat as he’s chasing the deer - that dog would be smacking his head on the dash every gear shift and turn. and that he passed up his chance at boning anna! damn, that’s why you are dumbass.   

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ok, what do i remember about this…i remember it had a lot of interesting angles on its shots but these were undercut by a pretty hokey score to me.  the nice thing about this as opposed to my problems with ray and walk the line was that they didn’t hide from his dark side.  that restaurant scene was pretty ugly, for sure.  and i want to go to that restaurant where you just nod at your glass and they pour you a fucking tumbler full of whiskey.  then you make a scene and embarrass everyone and nod for a refill and get it chop chop. 

i guess my other problem is i never got much of a sense of his art or writing.  other than his sense of humor i had no idea what the themes of his art were.   

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that’s almost how long ago it was that i watched this. i remember i thought it took a while to get its footing - some of the ‘dormitory life’ blocking seemed a bit forced, and the first shakey handheld as we follow otilia to the bus felt a bit out of place. but i really appreciated the payoffs on both of these. the handheld bit set up the tense creepy walk at the end (and after that scene when they finally have a small cut in time - whew, what a relief that was.) but most compelling for me were that all the relationships i thought reached the level of realism they attempt in the opening scene. otilia and her boyfriend - especially during the dinner party when he’s whining in his room. the abortionist and both the girls - how they each have a different level of trying to keep the relationship normal. gabita with her cakes, otilia with her nervous attempt at a conversation (’i was afraid we would miss each other…’) and the abortionist with how he treads the line of helping them but still letting them know he has zero sympathy. the centerpiece seemed to be otilia and gabita, and much of the point seems to be to slam gabita for her weakness and how she uses her weakness to get her way.  so i found that particular relationship annoying in its purposefulness but it was so well-observed and sharply drawn i still appreciated it. i also really liked marinca as otilia.  something about her expressions and rushed casualness really helped the feel.

i did think it was a bit too much to have otilia agree to the abortionist’s demand.  maybe it was realistic for that time/place and what needed to happen, but it felt unnecessary to the narrative.  yes, otilia had her own concerns in mind, but she was already going to ridiculous lengths to help gabita.  and tension and weight-wise i thought things were pretty tight and heavy as they were.  when otilia finds the knife that was enough for me. 

gabita’s dinner was also pretty awesome. 

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i guess in any movie about kids i’m most concerned about authenticity and minimal manipulativeness.  antoine is pretty believable - not too smart or too cool.  his defiance at school compared to his submissiveness at home rounded him out pretty well.  his parents are pretty believable screwups with some texture as they each change their attitudes.  but all the other authority figures left me skeptical.  maybe that’s really how things were, but it was just hard for me to buy that the teachers are so clueless, the social workers are just like ‘yeah you can’t handle him, let’s throw him in juvie’ and the cops just put him in jail with a criminal.  it seemed an unnecessarily harsh and manipulative string of events that were hard for me to buy.

i like with movies about kids the freedom and necessity to change tone scene to scene to an extreme.  the music when they skip school is maybe over-the-top happy-go-lucky but it’s still fun.  the mischievous touches like ‘bonjour madam’ helped these bits seem less forced.  i also liked the patheticness of their grand plan to steal a typewriter.  that seemed like the real deal to me.

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the masturbatory nature of this annoyed me quite a bit and made it difficult for me to enjoy anything else about it.  i think there should be a decent amount of enjoyment in seeing defoe and malkovich ham it up so much, and izzards’ and elwes’ characters were supposed to carry this further.  but the whole thing felt too clunky for their showiness to be anything but a lot of hand-waving to me.  expositional dialogue and no clear sense of space in most scenes left me feeling very little atmosphere.  they worked the hell out of that antique train though.

when shreck and murnau have their first scene alone and establish the ‘filmmaking is dangerous, predatory work!’ theme they lost me completely.  i watched it last week and don’t remember the specifics of the scene though.

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on the downside this was annoyingly cutesy and the resolution felt much more manipulative and contrived than in darjeeling. but just like in darjeeling i couldn’t help but admire the joy anderson takes in his cutesiness and his resolution. nothing about the resolution was interesting, emotionally real, or emotionally satisfying to me, but you really get a warmth from how much he clearly likes to feel good at the movies.

i really liked the use of zissou’s own films and especially his scores. the guitarist also i thought was great so i wish he would have just left out any actual pop songs altogether. the design details were fun but a big source of the cutesiness for me (along with the non-realistic effects on a movie with a $50 mill budget.) i’d say they got in the way but there wasn’t really anything to get in the way of. i liked defoe’s character but i would have liked a non-name there to emphasize his confusing nature. especially his angry appreciation of the flag on the helicopter.

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this was pretty horrible, but i was kind of distracted the whole time watching it so i made it through pretty easily. mostly it just needed some tighter editing. the dialogue and acting was bad but if there just weren’t so many shots of people walking to cars or the dude pouring his evian it’d be a lot better. the big angry over-the-top ending made it worth it for me i guess. the other 2 things i really liked: the pickpocket’s suit! and the line from the 2nd wife about the 3rd: ‘her split is not horizontal, but vertical.’

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i liked this quite a bit but i feel like it was kind of stretching a little too far for profundity.  mostly i just don’t see how the addiction theme tied into the sell-your-soul theme very well.  the sell-your-soul theme seemed more about conformity and success with your peers and there just wasn’t much there with the addiction theme.  it seemed kind of tacked on and manipulative, especially clayton’s talk to his kid about raining shit.  it was a very affecting scene to me but it just didn’t fit anywhere else.

but the sell-your-soul theme i loved and arthur’s monologue was great.  and i liked clayton’s reasoning with him of waiting, letting the revelation wear off.  the ending was a little much with the redemptiveness, and how’d they organize a whole sting in, what, an hour?  oh, also i found it funny that the realm and conquest book was bright red. 

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there’s certainly plenty to criticize with the dialogue and acting and some clunky construction - the scene when he goes to buy the motor in particular, shot in a bunch of closeups with no sense of space and just wooden all around. but there are so many nice well-observed moments to overlook these problems.  my favorites were the girl singing to the radio while her mom puts on her makeup and then the slow dance scene.  that one ends a little too stagy with the cry, but is still a beautiful scene in just one shot. 

i didn’t even know the story of this until after i watched it.  and even not knowing it was a student film by a 21! year old i enjoyed it immensely.  

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